Forget 'audience', 'unique visitors' and 'page views.' Thanks to social media, more and more brands are looking to base media buys on new metrics like 'influence.'

Take, for instance, the brands that are turning to the Influencer Network put together by Condé Nast's Vogue.

AdWeek describes the Influencer Network as "a panel of some 1,000 women deemed to have sway over other women, based on how active they are on social networks like Facebook and Polyvore, a fashion site where people create collages of outfits and share them with other members."

It's been a bad week for J.C. Penney, which found itself penalized by Google and scrutinized by the media after a paid link scheme apparently orchestrated by an outside vendor -- now fired -- was uncovered and detailed in the New York Times.

Kuwaiti blogger Mark Makhoul recently wrote a very critical review of Benihana on his blog. The restaurant's reaction? It sued the blogger...

The reaction of the restaurant to this criticism provides an excellent lesson in how not to respond to criticism online, and it has seriously backfired so far, with the story spreading all across the Middle East and further.

Marketers have been paying celebrities to endorse their products and services for decades, so it's no surprise that there's a booming market for celebrity endorsements via their social media profiles.

With the help of companies like Ad.ly, celebrities and 'influencers' are reportedly earning thousands upon thousands of dollars for a single tweet or Facebook status update.

In the United States, marketers paying high-profile individuals to tweet and blog about their products worried the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) so much that it developed guidelines around the practice.

If you're the head of a struggling newspaper, The Huffington Post has
an enviable business model. While content production is almost always the greatest cost in running a publishing/media business, it largely relies on the writing of an
unpaid army of contributors. The value proposition the HuffPo offers
them: exposure to a very large audience.

It's a model that has been the source of controversy. After all, the
HuffPo is a for-profit business, yet it doesn't pay the vast majority
of the individuals who labor for it. That's an especially interesting
thing for a company founded by a person who wrote a book entitled "Pigs
at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are
Undermining America."

Prominent blog network operator Gawker Media paid only $5,000 for the biggest tech scoop ever, but the total cost is proving to be far greater for Gawker Media.

As has been widely reported, police raided the home of Gawker Media employee Jason Chen. Chen is an editor for Gawker-owned Gizmodo, and is the man seen showing off the next-generation that was left in a Silicon Valley bar by an Apple employee before making its way to Gawker.

Later today, Apple is expected to unveil what some believe may be its most important product ever: a tablet computing device.

The Apple tablet has been the subject of speculation for some time and in the lead up to Apple's media event today, the buzz has hit a fever pitch as just about everyone is talking about it. Obviously, the press and blogosphere will have plenty of information to
feast on later, but I think the buzz about the Apple tablet is in and
of itself worth examining. Why? I think it tells us something about...

I received an email the other day, which caused me some significant concern. It was a request, which came out of the blue, asking me to consider to be paid for featuring certain content on my personal blog.

For me, this is a very unwanted and somewhat scandalous approach and I sincerely hope other bloggers feel the same way. If you think about it, it is a very seedy means to encourage independent people who take the time to blog about subjects they care about, to succumb to the incentive of money.

Retweets are referrals. The 'RT' abbreviation is a strong call to action. People trust their virtual friends to steer them in interesting directions, otherwise they wouldn’t be following them in the first place. As such retweets can generate lots of clicks, and they can quickly go viral.

In addition, there are a range of websites orientated around retweets. Think Digg, but instead of ‘diggs’ you have ‘retweets’, and usually these links are displayed in order of popularity (and not buried / subject to a complex algorithm to determine front-page status). These sites can be traffic drivers too. One of my favourites is the excellent TweetMeme.

So, considering the opportunity here, how can publishers make the most out of Twitter, and optimise the retweet factor?